Practice Alert on Long-Pending DACA Cases at the Nebraska Service Center

The NSC Liaison Committee asked AILA members for examples of DACA cases pending more than six months. In response to the committee’s call for examples, AILA received over 400 case examples, including over 100 cases that have been pending for more than a year. The vast majority of the examples AILA received are at the Nebraska Service Center (NSC): 283 have LIN (Nebraska) receipt numbers, and 120 have EAC (Vermont) receipt numbers. Most DACA cases at VSC were transferred to NSC in an August workload transfer. (AILA Doc. No. 13080850.) Only 12 case examples have an SRC (Texas) receipt number, and only 23 have a WAC (California) receipt number. In over half of the 400 cases shared with AILA, the survey respondents indicated that they were not aware of any unusual circumstances that would explain the slow processing time. Many of the remaining long-pending cases involved one or more of the following circumstances:

The requestor had previously been in removal proceedings or was in removal proceedings at the time of the DACA request;

The requestor had a petition or an application for other relief pending;

The requestor departed the United States for a considerable period of time either during or prior to the continuous residence period;

The requestor provided what the attorney considered to be a small amount of evidence to support either continuous residence during the relevant period or physical presence on June 15, 2012;

What to do about long DACA Processing Times

If you have a long-pending DACA case, check to see whether it may fall into one of the above categories. While not always true, these factors may lead to longer processing times. These findings are preliminary, and may not reflect USCIS policy decisions or adjudication trends.

Comments (3)

Marcos Ramirez

Hello so I got my high school diploma through an online school and was on removal proceedings as well…so how long more do you think it will take?? Have there been denials due to this?? Please help: date received: nov 6 fingerprints dec 15 then in March case was transferred from Vermont to Nebraska and haven’t heard anything since. Have done 3 e-request but they say nothing